The Obamacare fumble

It’s the cardinal rule of marketing management: Under-promise and over-deliver. If the sign at “Pirates of the Caribbean” says the wait is 45 minutes, and your kids are floating along on the ride in half that time, Disneyland really is the Happiest Place on Earth.

So it’s little wonder that the glaring contrast between the White House’s perpetually optimistic talk about its health care plan — “Try it! You’ll like it!” — and the messy realities of its rollout has sent President Barack Obama’s job approval ratings to all-time lows, and for the first time left the public with a negative view of his honesty in some surveys.

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Top lines from Obama’s mea culpa

From the start, the plan was more complex and unpredictable than Obama liked to acknowledge, reliant as it was on the profit-driven market forces of the private insurance industry, individually regulated in all 50 states. And his strategy for selling it was always based on an unspoken assumption that the public could not tolerate such unpleasant truths.

To be fair, the all-out partisan war to pass the bill, and then to defend it in the courts and Congress, was hardly the time for the president to warn, “This might not work right away, folks.”

But it is nevertheless Obama’s own months of upbeat predictions that have now left a chastened president grappling to restore his credibility, as he did on Thursday by announcing he would allow insurers to extend by a year the substandard plans they recently cancelled to comply with the new law’s demands for fuller coverage.

And it remains to be seen whether that attempted fix (which is voluntary) will satisfy the millions of Americans at risk of losing their current coverage — or stave off demands from restive Democrats in Congress for a legislative remedy. “I am confident that by — by the time we look back on this next year, that people are going to say this is working well, and it’s helping a lot of people,” Obama predicted.

Maybe so. But if not, Obama’s latest claim will be just one more unmet expectation to be thrown back in the face of a leader who likes to tell his own worried aides when things are going badly, “I got this.” Except when he doesn’t.

“At every single point, they’ve over-promised and under-delivered” on Obamacare, said Matthew Dowd, George W. Bush’s former pollster who grew so disillusioned with his old boss’s performance that he voted for Obama. “And at every single point, they’ve chosen a short-term communications strategy, as opposed to a long-term governing strategy. And the short-term communication strategy was to put out the fire by saying ‘It’s all going to be OK.”’

Daniel Pink, a former speechwriter for Vice President Al Gore and best-selling author of “To Sell is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others” and other books on business, said the administration had fallen prey to the age-old reluctance to deliver bad news to those at the top — and then failed to pass that news on to constituents.

“They’ve endured far more long-term pain from their happy talk than they would have short-term pain from telling the truth,” he said. “I fear this is going to go into the annals with George H. W. Bush’s ‘no new taxes,’ and Bill Clinton’s ‘I didn’t have sex with that woman.’ It strikes me as something very sticky.”

It’s hard to know right now where the Obamacare mess falls on the presidential calamity scale. It’s by no means clear that the health care debacle will be for Obama what Hurricane Katrina was for the second Bush: a management disaster from which his presidency never recovers. But it’s an uncomfortable coincidence that Obama’s latest approval rating — hovering around 38 percent — is just where Bush’s was at this point in his second term, two months after Katrina devastated New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.

Ronald Reagan’s nadir — the Iran-Contra scandal — came later in his second term. His presidency later stabilized after he apologized for denying that he had traded arms for hostages by saying, “My heart and my best intentions still tell me that’s true. But the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.”

Obama tried a similar — if wordier — mea culpa Thursday with respect to his repeated pledge that people who liked their current insurance plan could keep it, explaining: “There is no doubt that the way I put that forward unequivocally ended up not being accurate. It was not because of my intention not to deliver on that commitment and that promise.”

And he repeated that the promise remained true for “the vast majority of Americans” who get insurance through their employers, and not in the individual insurance market, where plans change often, pricing is volatile and coverage is spotty. As recently as last week, the White House website itself was still pledging, “Nothing in the proposal forces anyone to change the insurance they have. Period.”